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Miyamoto talking with developers for Wii U support

Nintendo EAD general manager Shigeru Miyamoto has been meeting with developers to inspire their support of the upcoming Wii U console. Miyamoto told IGN that he has been meeting with developers individually to show them the new features offered by the Wii U.

"I am trying to meet with the game developers individually for this matter," Miyamoto told IGN. "The real subject is whether I'll be able to - we'll be able to - convince developers inside of the licensing publishers to be excited about the new features of the Wii U, so much so that they'll be enthused towards making brand new entertainment that I couldn't come up with myself."

"The fact of the matter is that most third-party licensees from a business point of view, had to create multi-platform titles - and because Nintendo has been trying to create very unique hardware, oftentimes it was not considered the first choice for them to work on multi-platform software. So it's the entire company decision-making process that is hindering developer's ability from making unique titles on Wii U hardware.”

“There might be some misunderstanding - as if Nintendo alone had some special know-how, and because Nintendo has not shared those unique, secret protocols with other, third-party publishers have not been able to create the exciting, unique gameplay on Nintendo hardware. But that was not the case,” Miyamoto said.

"I do not think that providing any special technologies, know how or skills would be able to change the situation, because I understand that most third-party developers already have those things."

The Nintendo Wii U will hit North America on November 18. The system's European and Australian debut follows on November 30 with its Japanese release happening on December 8.

11 Comments

His comments seem to be a fairly reasonable assessment of the situation, however there are more factors to do with money and cut of profit that influence these things.

However no matter how hard he works, people will always through their teddy out of the pram. Look at EA and their attitude towards the Wii U despite all of their public lip service from the previous year.

Nintendo do this to themselves in all honesty. They tend to push their own stuff at the expense of third parties so it's no wonder that none of their non-portable hardware has been taken all that seriously to date. It's simply not viable in today's climate to throw money at a project and when see it killed by the platform owners own high profile offerings. Contrast that to Sony and Microsoft who will happily scream your name from the roof if your game is going to look good on their platform.

The Dreamcast has an LCD screen on its controller (via the VMU) but most of the games didn't make use of it for gameplay. Same thing with the Wii U's GamePad, those added features are there to give developers the choice to utilize them or not. I'm happy just being able to switch playing from the big screen to my GamePad.

To me the controller makes the Wii U an interesting machine, and I've been wondering how I could use it, but running a really REALLY small indie team, and considering we have zero (or less than zero, actually) console dev experience,it's better not to think about it. I have no idea how relationships between Nintendo and indies will play out for the Wii U.

Sergio - From what I've been reading, they have been pushing digital games really hard and what is going to be on their own store from day 1 is quite impressive. They seem to be very interested in indies but I have no idea how they are doing their compliance standards for these titles. Probably an important factor as Nintendo's criteria can be a little strange at times.

Peter, what he's trying to say is that most 3rd party titles on Nintendo systems aren't worth shouting about to begin with.

Sergio, as Patrick noted, they've enhanced their indie support greatly to the point I've hard many small studios say they've surpassed MS and Sony in that department now. At the very least, it's worth contacting them to find out more. You may get lucky.